With Christmas just 10 days away how about putting a little extra something in tuxmachines stocking this year? I know times are tough but if you have an extra 5 or 10 or even 20 bucks it would be a really nice way to say thanks to Susan for bringing us our daily fix of news and information.

Took a little break tonight from compiling 64bit PCLinuxOS packages. I took a peek at ChromeOS in Virtualbox. Pretty much the Chrome browser with a login screen and additional settings. Wanna play with ChromeOS in Virtualbox then you can get a vanilla image from the link below.

Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler said today that Mozilla has formed a partnership with Tylenol. This is in response to the business community after complaints that Mozilla's new "Rapid Release" development cycle will cause headaches for IT managers. So starting today all users who download Firefox 5.0 will also get a coupon for a discount off of Tylenol's "Rapid Release" Gel tablets.

1. Maximize the KDE Panel
Right Click on the panel and select Unlock Widgets
Click on the Cashew on the right side of the panel
Click on More Settings
Click on Maximize Panel
Click on the red X to close

I wish Linux developers who build libraries for Linux would make their new versions backward compatible with the old version. Also wish they would stop changing their library majors. It is a big pain in the ass to have to rebuild source rpm/deb packages simply to relink a package because of a change with the library major. Every time a developer changes their library major, God kills a kitten.

I upgraded the Enlightenment packages post beta 3 for PCLinuxOS which fixes an ordering issue that was present in the beta 3 library release. itask-ng is still acting a bit funky when trying to drag and drop but ordering through the setup menu works good. This update will appear shortly in the Synaptic Package Manager for those who have Enlightenment installed.

We uploaded some freshly baked ISOS for PCLinuxOS to the repositories. They are gui hot and delicious. PCLinuxOS 2010.12 holiday CDs are now available for KDE 4, Gnome, LXDE, XFCE and Enlightenment desktops featuring the latest updates from the PCLinuxOS software repository. All CD features kernel 2.6.33.7bfs kernel for maximum desktop performance. Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support.

I finished up packaging Enlightenment E-17 Beta 3 desktop. There still seems to be a few bugs in some of the non-core libs but overall a good release from the Enlightenment developers. This update will appear shortly in your Synaptic Package Manager if you have the Enlightenment desktop installed on PCLinuxOS.

As of today, the latest release in KDE's 4.5 series is 4.5.4, which adds a bunch of stabilization and translation updates on top of 4.5. PCLinuxOS users in general are encouraged to upgrade to 4.5.4. This update is available through the Synaptic Package manager if you have KDE 4 installed.

Updated both PCLinuxOS KDE full and mini isos to 2010.11 with the latest updates through yesterday. This brings in KDE 4.5.3 on the isos, Firefox 3.6.12, Thunderbird 3.1.6, Digikam 1.6.0 and Pidgin 2.7.7 just to name a few of the updates. This should make it easy for users new to PCLinuxOS as they won't have so many updates to perform to get to current status.

Saimer and I finished packaging Gnome 2.32.1 desktop for PCLinuxOS and shipping the packages to the repositories. This update should appear shortly in your Synaptic Package Manager if you have the Gnome Destkop installed.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.
Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.
Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.
Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices.
Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default).
You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download.
Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :)
I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least.
Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development

KDE Frameworks 5.62.0 and Reports From Akademy 2019 in Milan

KDE Frameworks are over 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks web page.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

The last week I was in Milan with my wife Aiswarya to attend Akademy 2019, the yearly event of the KDE community. Once again it was a great experience, with lots of interesting conferences and productive BoF sessions (“Birds of a Feather”, a common name for a project meeting during a conference).
On Sunday, we presented our talk “GCompris in Kerala, part 2”. First, Aiswarya told some bits of Free-Software history in Kerala, gave examples of how GCompris is used there, and explained her work to localize the new version of GCompris in Malayalam (the language of this Indian state). Then I made a quick report of what happened in GCompris the last 2 years, and talked about the things to come for our next release.

I attended my first ever Akademy! The event was held at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy this year. And the experience was splendid. During the 2 day conference, I had the opportunity to talk at the Student Showcase, where all of the SoC students presented their work to the community. There were about 8 students, and everyone gave a good briefing on their project.
My project this summer was with Kdenlive, the open source non linear professional video editor. I proposed to revamp one of the frequently used tools in the editor, called the Titler tool, which is used to create title clips. Title clips are video clips that contain text and/or images that are composited or appended to your video (eg: subtitles). The problem with the titler tool as it is, is that it uses QGraphicsView to describe a title clip and QGraphicsView was deprecated since the release of Qt5. This obviously leads to problems - upstream bugs crawling affecting the functionality of the tool and an overall degradation in the ease of maintenance of the codebase. Moreover, adding new features to the existing code base was no easy task and therefore, a complete revamp was something in sights of the developer community in Kdenlive for a long time now. I proposed to rework on the backend for the period of GSoC replacing the use of XML with QML and use a new rendering backend with QQuickRenderControl, along with a new MLT module to handle the QML frames. I was able to cover most of the proposed work, I seek to continue working on it and finish evolving the titler tool.